How to Unlock Android Phone If the Screen Is Broken?
Here’s a popular quiz. You drop your phone. When you pick it up, you notice that you have broken the screen. You:
a) Use unkind words to express frustration with your clumsiness.
(b) Crying never setting up fingerprint or face authentication for your device
(c) Think about how you are going to access the contents of your phone, now that you cannot use the screen
(d) Think how much money you have left this month to buy a new fancy phone.
(e) All of the above
I hate to put words into the mouth of Lifehacker reader Dominique , but I suspect she started at (a) , went to (c) and probably gave up (d) . We’ve all been there.
It is not interesting to break the phone screen. While you probably won’t have much of a data loss problem if you’ve done a good job of backing up your device, I suspect a lot of people don’t back up content like text messages unless their phones do it for them (even then, are you only backing up the texts, or do you also include multimedia?)
And if you are in no rush to back up your photos, or if you have files on your Android device, and only on your Android device when your device kisses the sidewalk, I feel like your anxiety grows from here. This is probably what Dominic is experiencing now. She writes:
“I have lg stylo 4 and the screen is ready. I cannot dial the number to unblock it for download. Please help! I need messages! “
Using Android through Broken Screen: The Easy Way
There are two obvious methods to access your Android no matter what you did with the screen. I just tested the first (and simplest) and it worked like a charm, although you probably have to run to your favorite local store (or Amazon) to pick up a small piece of equipment.
Here’s what you need to do: Look at the connector on your phone. You will need an adapter that plugs into this jack – some kind of USB if you’re using Android, and either USB-C or LIGHTING on the iPhone. In your case, you need a USB-C (male) to USB-A (female) adapter that looks something like this:
You plug it into your phone and then plug your regular computer mouse directly into the jack. (Yes, using the naming conventions “masculine” and “feminine” seems incredibly outdated.)
Once you do this, your phone will immediately recognize your mouse as an input device. After that, you can use it in the same way as with your finger – pulling out a PIN input, tapping on numbers and doing whatever else you would normally do on your Android device. My advice? Use it to email yourself whatever you want on your phone. This is either to make a reliable backup of your device (remembering to save all text photos or videos separately, or use an app that can back up text and media) while you think about what you are going to do with your broken device.
If you have a USB-C hub with multiple USB-A ports, you can connect both a mouse and a keyboard to make the process easier.
Using Android through a Broken Screen: The Hard Way
If you want even more fun, you can “jailbreak” your phone with a computer, provided you have previously enabled a fun little tweak called USB Debugging. To do this, on my Pixel, you’ll need to open Settings> About Phone , then scroll down and tap on Build Number to unlock developer options . Then go back to the main Settings screen, tap System, tap Advanced , tap Developer Options and scroll down a bit until you can enable USB debugging . The exact steps may differ for your Android.
From there, find the correct ADB drivers for your device on its manufacturer’s website – something you probably want to just go ahead and Google. (To save time, here are the LG drivers . I have a Pixel, so I’ll need the SDK Platform Tools and maybe the Google USB driver .)
Install them on your system. Open a command prompt or terminal and navigate to whatever folder adb.exe is in. ( I don’t have an LG phone, so I can’t test this for you. However, the adb.exe file can be easily found after unzipping the Platform Tools SDK.)
From there, try adb reboot and hitting Enter. Nothing happens if you haven’t already allowed ADB to access your phone. This is what you need to do on the unlocked phone itself, which means you’ll need to do it already for this unlocking trick to work at all.
Assuming you’ve jumped through all of these hoops earlier – I said it was the hard way – you should be able to use these commands to unlock the device:
ADB shell input KeyEvent 26 ADB input shell touch swipes 930 880 930 000 ADB shell input text XXOX ADB input shell KeyEvent 66
Obviously replace “XXXX” with your PIN. If you want an easier way to do this, just copy and paste this entire line:
adb shell input keyevent 26 && adb shell input touchscreen swipe 930 880 930 000 && adb shell input text XXXX && adb shell input keyevent 66
I just tested this on my Pixel and it works great. However, there is so much you need to do with the home screen before this method can help you that I think the keyboard / mouse technique – the “easy way” – is probably best. However, you can follow the steps ahead of time to enable ADB access from your computer for your, well, new phone. Thus, if a disaster ever happens again, you can also use ADB to create a backup of your device.
How to access the contents of this backup is a whole additional process, but at least you’ll have … something? Honestly, probably the best option is to back up your phone using Google tools / services. And of course, make sure you always have copies of everything you store on your Android device. You never know when the next time your phone might take a leap of faith right on the floor.